Indeed, other MGM animators thought this new series was old-hat. There had been hundreds of these, even before Felix the Cat started in 1919. They rejigged one of the oldest ideas in the game – a chase format, featuring cat and mouse. Quimby put Hanna and Barbera together early in 1939 to come up with a new idea, which they did not. There were already two distinct streams in Hollywood animation – the sweeter, sentiment-laden Disney productions, and the harder-edged style of Warner Bros, where Chuck Jones and Tex Avery were developing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Porky Pig cartoons – all of which were wackier, more surreal and more violent than anything in the market. Fred Quimby wanted rowdier cartoons with more violence, and Rudy Ising had resisted him.
When Harman-Ising broke with Warner Bros in 1933 to move to MGM, Hanna went with them.īarbera came west in 1937, as MGM was about to dump Harman-Ising. His talent for music and drawing got him into the Harman-Ising animation studio in 1930. The family moved to Los Angeles, where he dropped out of college and washed cars in the early years of the Depression. He grew up all over the western US, as his father built railroads and sewers. Hanna came from an Irish-American family of seven children – six girls and him. His humour was broad and wild, with an inclination towards violence.
CinemaScope film poster for Tom and Jerry.īarbera was born on Delancey Street in New York, among the Sicilian migrants of Little Italy, but raised in Brooklyn.